Sociology: Perspectives and Key Concepts Flashcards

Question 1

What is Sociology?

Accepted Answer

The systematic study of human social life, groups and societies, examining how social structures, institutions and relationships shape behavior and how people in turn reshape them.

Question 2

Define Sociological Imagination.

Accepted Answer

C. Wright Mills's term for the ability to connect an individual's private experiences to wider history and social structure, seeing personal troubles as linked to public issues.

Question 3

Define Macro Sociology.

Accepted Answer

Analysis of large-scale social structures, institutions and long-term processes, such as the economy, the state or the class system, rather than individual encounters.

Question 4

Define Micro Sociology.

Accepted Answer

Analysis of small-scale, everyday face-to-face interaction and the meanings people create in it, such as conversations, classrooms or family routines.

Question 5

Define Structural Functionalism.

Accepted Answer

A macro perspective that views society as a system of interdependent parts, each institution contributing to overall stability, much as organs keep a living body working.

Question 6

Define Value Consensus.

Accepted Answer

The functionalist idea that members of a society broadly share core values and norms, and that this agreement is what holds the social order together.

Question 7

Define Social Fact.

Accepted Answer

Durkheim's term for ways of acting, thinking and feeling that exist outside individuals and constrain them, such as laws, customs, language and rates of behavior.

Question 8

What is Anomie?

Accepted Answer

A condition of normlessness Durkheim described, in which shared rules weaken during rapid change, leaving people without clear guidance on what to want or how to act.

Question 9

Define Manifest Function.

Accepted Answer

In Merton's terms, the intended and openly recognized consequence of a social pattern or institution, the purpose people would give if asked.

Question 10

Define Latent Function.

Accepted Answer

In Merton's terms, an unintended and usually unrecognized consequence of a social pattern or institution that still helps the wider system.

Question 11

Define Strain Theory.

Accepted Answer

Robert Merton's explanation of deviance as a result of a gap between culturally approved goals, such as wealth, and the legitimate means available to reach them.

Question 12

Define Conflict Theory.

Accepted Answer

A macro perspective that sees society as an arena of inequality, where groups compete for scarce resources such as wealth and power and the advantaged protect their position.

Question 13

What is Marxism?

Accepted Answer

A conflict theory, from Karl Marx, holding that capitalist societies are divided between owners of the means of production and workers whose labor is exploited for profit.

Question 14

Define Means of Production.

Accepted Answer

In Marxist theory, the resources used to produce goods and wealth, including land, factories, machinery and raw materials, whose ownership defines a person's class position.

Question 15

What is Proletariat?

Accepted Answer

Marx's term for the working class in capitalism, people who own no means of production and survive by selling their labor power to employers for wages.

Question 16

What is Ideology?

Accepted Answer

A set of ideas and beliefs that justifies existing social arrangements; Marxists argue the dominant ideology serves the ruling class by making inequality seem natural or fair.

Question 17

Define Symbolic Interactionism.

Accepted Answer

A micro perspective holding that people act toward things based on the meanings those things have for them, meanings built and revised through social interaction.

Question 18

Define Labeling Theory.

Accepted Answer

The interactionist view, developed by Howard Becker, that deviance is not a quality of an act but the result of others successfully applying a deviant label to someone.

Question 19

Define Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.

Accepted Answer

A belief or expectation that causes itself to come true, because people change their behavior in response to it, even though it was false at first.

Question 20

Define Looking-Glass Self.

Accepted Answer

Charles Horton Cooley's idea that a person's self-image develops from imagining how they appear to others and how those others judge them.

Question 21

What is Dramaturgy?

Accepted Answer

Erving Goffman's approach that analyzes social life as a theatrical performance, in which people manage the impression they give, using front-stage and back-stage regions.

Question 22

What is Verstehen?

Accepted Answer

Max Weber's term for empathetic understanding: interpreting social action by grasping the meanings and motives it has for the people carrying it out.

Question 23

Define Protestant Ethic.

Accepted Answer

Weber's argument that Calvinist beliefs in disciplined work, thrift and worldly success as signs of salvation helped create the spirit of modern capitalism.

Question 24

What is Feminism?

Accepted Answer

A set of perspectives that examine gender inequality, explaining how social structures disadvantage women and proposing ways to achieve equality between the sexes.

Question 25

What is Intersectionality?

Accepted Answer

Kimberlé Crenshaw's concept that social categories such as race, gender and class overlap, producing distinct experiences of disadvantage that one category alone cannot explain.

Question 26

What is Postmodernism?

Accepted Answer

A perspective holding that contemporary society is fragmented and media-saturated, and that grand theories claiming to explain everything no longer fit people's chosen, fluid identities.

Question 27

Define Structure and Agency.

Accepted Answer

The central debate over how far behavior is shaped by external social structures versus individuals' capacity to make their own free, meaningful choices.

Question 28

What is Socialization?

Accepted Answer

The lifelong process through which people learn the norms, values, language and roles of their society, first through family and later through school, peers and media.

Question 29

What is Norms?

Accepted Answer

Shared, specific rules or expectations about how people should behave in particular situations, enforced informally through approval and disapproval or formally through law.

Question 30

What is Positivism?

Accepted Answer

The methodological approach holding that sociology should copy the natural sciences, using objective, quantitative methods to uncover measurable social facts and causal laws.

Question 31

What is Interpretivism?

Accepted Answer

The methodological approach holding that sociology must understand the subjective meanings behind social action, favoring qualitative methods such as observation and unstructured interviews.

Question 32

What is Reliability?

Accepted Answer

The extent to which a research method produces consistent results when repeated by another researcher using the same procedures.

Question 33

What is Validity?

Accepted Answer

The extent to which research findings give a true, genuine picture of the social reality being studied, rather than a distorted or superficial one.

Question 34

Define Émile Durkheim.

Accepted Answer

French founding sociologist (1858-1917) who argued social facts must be studied scientifically and used suicide rates to show how social integration shapes individual behavior.